Losers for Biden: Romney Campaign Alums Abandon GOP for Joe

Former staffers from Mitt Romney's failed presidential campaign are abandoning the Republican Party and working to elect former vice president Joe Biden.

Micah Spangler, who worked as a Florida field director for Romney in 2012, is working with the Biden campaign to "cultivate a network of Romney alums that want to help elect Joe in November," according to an email Spangler wrote to solicit support for his deviant scheme.

Spangler's former failed boss, who was the only GOP senator to vote to convict President Donald Trump, could be among those who end up backing Biden in the fall, or at least writing in "Alexander Hamilton." Romney was forced to endure a ritualistic humiliation after Trump's victory in 2016 when the president-elect invited him to dinner and pretended like he wanted to nominate him for secretary of state.

Spangler told the Washington Times that "dozens and dozens" of his former colleagues on Romney's failed 2012 campaign have "signed up" to be a part of the "network," whatever that means. A poor man's Lincoln Project? Or a desperate ploy to improve their social standing and advance their careers in politics?

The Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump super PAC started by a group of failed Republican strategists, has been lavished with Twitter praise from anti-Trump liberals for its snarky attack ads. One of the group's founders, John Weaver, was an adviser to failed GOP candidates John McCain, Jon Huntsman, and John Kasich, and has also advised the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Not all former Romney staffers were eager to jump on the Biden bandwagon. Brett Doster, who also worked for Romney's campaign in Florida but didn't remember Spangler, told the Times he wished his former colleagues "no personal ill-will," but questioned "the patriotism and wisdom of supporting Joe Biden, who would be a cultural and economic disaster for the country."

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/romney-biden-losers/

Study: Border Barriers Work

Barriers along America's southwestern border significantly reduce illegal immigration, especially by low-skilled migrants, a new study argues.

The analysis, by University of Illinois at Chicago economist Benjamin Feigenberg, provides empirical evidence that the construction of border barriers—in this case, the 700 miles of border fencing authorized by Congress in 2006—cuts migration both in the areas where they are constructed and in adjacent territory.

In total, Feigenberg estimates, a fully fenced border would deter some 86,000 people from crossing the border every three months, at a cost of less than $2,000 per person deterred

•These findings provide robust empirical support for the idea of constructing a barrier along America's often-porous border with Mexico—a proposal long-supported by Republicans, and President Donald Trump in particular, but vociferously opposed by Democrats. The failure to support more border fencing, once a bipartisan goal, may have helped drive the recent wave of immigration that led to a crisis at the border.

•To reach his conclusions, Feigenberg examined the results of the 2006 Secure Fence Act, a bipartisan bill signed into law under then-president George W. Bush. The bill called for the construction of some 700 miles of fencing along the Mexican-American border; a subsequent appropriations bill put the exact location of the fencing at the discretion of the secretary of homeland security.

•Using a novel dataset, Feigenberg argues that the locations at which the fencing was constructed were effectively randomly distributed. That allows him to exploit the randomness in variation in construction timing to measure the effects of building a border fence on migration in adjacent Mexican territories using a robust collection of U.S. and Mexican government data.

•The results are pronounced. The paper finds that fence construction in a given municipality reduces average migration by 27 percent. In addition, fence construction in an adjacent municipality has a spillover effect, reducing migration by an additional 15 percent.

•The total effect, Feigenberg writes, is to alter the illegal immigrant population in the United States: "Fence construction significantly decreases the size of the likely undocumented, Mexican-born population on the US side of the border and in the US interior."

•That reduction is particularly concentrated among low-skilled migrants, with the data indicating that the probability of migration becomes less biased towards those with less education after border fencing is constructed. Feigenberg is not able to conclude what drives this change, but speculates that increased crossing costs' differential effect on low-earners, limited access to credit, and "differences in access to legal migration opportunities offer potential explanations."

•This last finding is significant because of the particular role that low-skilled migration plays in the debate over immigration restriction. Proponents of increased immigration argue that the complementary effects of immigrants increase national wealth on net. But opponents argue that low-skilled migration lowers wages and job opportunities for the lowest-skilled Americans, in turn fomenting social unrest.

https://freebeacon.com/policy/study-border-barriers-work/

June Jobs Numbers Blow Past Expectations

UPDATE: President Trump held a press briefing at the White House and reacted to the numbers.

Original post

The jobs numbers for June are in and they've blown way past expectations with 4.8 million positions created.

"Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 4.8 million in June, and the unemployment rate declined to 11.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. These improvements in the labor market reflected the continued resumption of economic activity that had been curtailed in March and April due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and efforts to contain it. In June, employment in leisure and hospitality rose sharply. Notable job gains also occurred in retail trade, education and health services, other services, manufacturing, and professional and business services," the Labor Department released Thursday morning.

The numbers come while governors across the country reinstitute shutdown orders as Wuhan coronavirus cases increase. Many businesses are refusing to shut down again, citing arbitrary reasons given by the government.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/07/02/june-jobs-numbers-blow-past-expectations-n2571759

Universities Sowing the Seeds of Their Own Obsolescence

Victor Davis Hanson

When mobs tore down a statue of Ulysses S. Grant and defaced a monument to African American veterans of the Civil War, many people wondered whether the protesters had ever learned anything in high school or college.

Did any of these iconoclasts know the difference between Grant and Robert E. Lee? Could they recognize the name "Gettysburg"? Could they even identify the decade in which the Civil War was fought?

Universities are certainly teaching our youth to be confident, loud and self-righteous. But the media blitz during these last several weeks of protests, riots and looting also revealed a generation that is poorly educated and yet petulant and self-assured without justification.

Many of the young people on the televised front lines of the protests are in their 20s. But most appear juvenile, at least in comparison to their grandparents – survivors of the Great Depression and World War II.

How can so many so sheltered and prolonged adolescents claim to be all-knowing?

Ask questions like these, and the answers ultimately lead back to the university.

Millions of those who graduate from college or drop out do so in arrears. There is some $1.5 trillion in aggregate student debt in the U.S. Such burdens sometimes delay marriage. They discourage child-rearing. They make home ownership hard – along with all the other experiences we associate with the transition to adulthood.

The universities, some with multibillion-dollar endowments, will accept no moral responsibility. They are not overly worried that many of their indebted graduates discover their majors don't translate into well-paid jobs or guarantee employers that grads can write, speak or think cogently.

One unintended consequence of the chaotic response to the COVID-19 epidemic and the violence that followed the police killing of George Floyd is a growing re-examination of the circumstances that birthed the mass protests.

There would be far less college debt if higher education, rather than the federal government, guaranteed its own students' loans. If universities backed loans with their endowments and infrastructure, college presidents could be slashing costs. They would ensure that graduates were more likely to get good-paying jobs thanks to rigorous coursework and faculty accountability.

Taxpayers who are hectored about their supposed racism, homophobia and sexism don't enjoy such finger-wagging from loud, sheltered, 20-something moralists. Perhaps taxpayers will no longer have to subsidize the abuse if higher education is deemed to be a politicized institution and thus its endowment income ruled to be fully taxable.

If socialism has become a campus creed, maybe Ivy League schools can be hit with an annual "wealth tax" on their massive endowments in order to redistribute revenue to poorer colleges.

https://townhall.com/columnists/victordavishanson/2020/07/02/universities-sowing-the-seeds-of-their-own-obsolescence-n2571679

Senior Living Facilities: All the Vote Fraud We Cannot See

Despite prosecutions and public stories identifying vote fraud activists targeting seniors, many in our media and political class continue to deny that our elderly population can be singled out for vote manipulation and suppression.

•Vote fraudsters recognize the unique challenges of some seniors, and exploit these to achieve their own deceitful political ends. The fraud is real, institutionalized —and must be stopped.

•It is more efficient to target seniors in one facility than committing door to door vote fraud. With approximately 2.5 million seniors in assisted living or nursing facilities and even more in independent living, our trusting Greatest Generation is high risk for being targeted by dishonest political activists.

•The elderly usually make the difficult decision to enter senior living due to the normal processes of aging. Loss of vision, mobility and the onset of dementia make it challenging to safely live at home and difficult for many seniors to complete ballots without assistance. In addition to needing help, their voting behavior is noteworthy in assessing why they might be targeted.

Seniors vote Republican by a large margin. A 2016 Pew Research study found 53 percent identify as Republican, and in 2016, voters over 65 voted for Trump by nine points over Clinton

•So, who would have an interest in suppressing or manipulating senior votes?

•The answer is, of course, Democrats and their associated activist and organizational allies who want to defeat Republicans at the polls. One group in particular already has a unique foothold in senior residence communities and is one of the Democratic party’s strongest supporters.

•The Service Employees International Union was founded in 1921 to organize building services employees, but in recent years has focused on healthcare workers whose numbers are growing as Baby Boomers age.

•The union boasts 1.1 million healthcare-associated members with nearly 50K nursing home members in six states and the District of Columbia alone. It devotes much of its resources to unionizing employees in senior facilities and home health care.

•The SEIU is also a powerful Democratic political machine. In the 2018 midterms, 99 percent of its Congressional donations went to Democrats. All of its outside group funding is identified as Democratic/liberal.

•In the 2016 presidential cycle, 99 percent of its $11.8 million in donations went to Democratic candidates or liberal groups.

•In its efforts to unionize caregivers in Minnesota a few years ago, SEIU was accused of forging ballots, and made no secret of using its members as vote collection activists. In senior residences, it has a potential group of built-in activists.

•One 2018 case of nursing home vote theft videotaped in Texas showed the ballot harvester bragging she collected 100 coerced votes for a Democratic candidate. A Texas vote integrity activist recently collected solid evidence of nursing home vote fraud resulting in an official investigation. There are many stories of institutional elderly vote theft made public by observant family members.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kenblackwell/2020/07/02/senior-living-facilities-all-the-vote-fraud-we-cannot-see-n2571747